The Crisis Reader ─ Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the N.a.a.c.p.'s Crisis Magazine

After its start in 1910, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races magazine became the major outlet for works by African American writers and intellectuals. In 1920, Langston Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published in The Crisis and W. E. B. Du Bois, the magazine's editor, wrote about the coming "renaissance of American Negro literature," beginning what is now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The Crisis Reader is a collection of poems, short stories, plays, and essays from this great literary period and includes, in addition to four previously unpublished poems by James Weldon Johnson, work by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke.

Sondra Kathryn Wilson is a senior researcher at Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, and editor of several volumes of the work of James Weldon Johnson. She lives in New York City.